Step-by-step guide on setting up a system to sniff Android app traffic using Genymotion, mitmproxy, and Frida.

Requirements

• VirtualBox
• Genymotion
• mitmproxy
• Frida
• Android tools

pacman -S virtualbox mitmproxy android-tools

yay -S genymotion

pip install Frida frida-tools

Launch genymotion and create an android vm

Select ‘bridge’ network mode when creating the vm in genymotion

Launch mitmproxy on the host machine

mitmproxy

Enable the proxy on Android

adb shell settings put global http_proxy <ip>:<port>

The default port for mitmproxy is 8080

If you want to disable the proxy, use the following:

adb shell settings put global http_proxy :0

Note: disabling this way will only work if it was enabled via adb initially

Install your mitmproxy ssl certificate on Android

On the Android vm, browse to mitm.it, download the certificate for Android, and install it via Android settings (this is a bit different in each version of Android)

Note: you can do this via adb, but I find it to be more tedious

Now you should be able to inspect all of the https traffic from your Android device in mitmproxy, but some apps use certificate pinning. There are a few ways around this, I like using frida

Magisk is a solution as well but it requires a more specific Android environment, and is more tedious to use

Check the cpu arch of your Android VM (likely x86)

adb shell getprop ro.product.cpu.abi

Download/install/run frida server on the Android vm

Head to https://github.com/frida/frida/releases and find frida-server for your vm’s architecture

wget https://github.com/frida/frida/releases/download/14.2.18/frida-server-14.2.18-android-x86.xz
xz -d frida-server-14.2.18.xz
adb push frida-server-14.2.18 /data/local/tmp/frida-server
adb shell chmod 755 /data/local/tmp/frida-server
adb shell /data/local/tmp/frida-server &

On a physical device, place the frida-server binary, then:

adb shell
su
./data/local/tmp/frida-server &

List processes running on your Android system

frida-ps -U -a

Inject code into a specific process

frida -U -f com.process.name -l ssl.js -–no-pause

You can find various examples for this over @ https://codeshare.frida.re

e.g. https://codeshare.frida.re/@sowdust/universal-android-ssl-pinning-bypass-2/

Have fun!